Foreign policy : The One-Man Show

[Mass]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/26/john_kerry_one_man_show

Over the last two months, according to the State Department, Secretary of State John Kerry has spent 31 days traveling to 18 countries. He has spent 123 hours in the air. He has been to Turkey three times. He has met five times with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Kerry has served, in short, as a one-man diplomatic corps, a first responder to global crises. Meanwhile, the State Department limps along with hardly an assistant secretary in place.

You could argue that Kerry has his priorities backwards. But you would be wrong.
...
But you also can't make progress on any of these frozen crises without making a new start. Middle East peace talks, Israel-Turkey relations, negotiations with Iran -- they've all been more or less in a holding pattern since 2010. On Syria, the Obama administration has adopted a policy of no policy while its worst fears -- a sectarian civil war serving as a magnet for jihadists -- have come to pass; the Syrian regime has now provoked a crisis in the White House by apparently transgressing the President's "red line" on the use of chemical weapons. Iraq, too, is coming apart at the seams, with a Shiite government trying to crush its Sunni opponents. In his angry screed, Dispensable Nation, Vali Nasr charges that Obama has abandoned his own professed faith in diplomacy. But Kerry hasn't; and he is doing his best to renew the administration's depleted energies.
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Kerry may prove to be wrong; but as a friend of mine used to say, you can't hit if you don't swing. I asked Nicholas Burns, who after serving five secretaries of state, most recently as undersecretary to Condoleezza Rice, may be the foremost authority on the job: Has he watched Kerry's one-man show with any misgivings? The opposite, he said. He compared Kerry to the most successful recent secretaries, including James Baker and George Schultz, who worked the big issues relentlessly, personally, and several levels deep. "There is no substitute for the secretary of state in our system," as Burns put it. In the end, he says, the secretary is "negotiator-in-chief," and has to spend more time personally tending to crises than managing the department and even fighting inter-agency battles.
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Kerry has, in fact, been here before. Since 2009, he has talked Karzai and Kayani off a series of ledges, only to see them climb back up once he's left town. The fact that he's now secretary of state adds weight to his diplomacy, but it won't change that dynamic. The United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have national security interests which clash in central ways; diplomacy can not change that, though it can help leaders recognize and build on their shared interests. Kerry is genuinely good at that. We'll see how much it matters.

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I have written in the past that Kerry is a man of physical courage and intellectual caution. I have no reason to change that view. But now that he is secretary of state, what matters is whether he has what I would call diplomatic courage: the willingness to throw yourself into a negotiation whose outcome you know that you cannot control, and which may well end badly. Of course one also needs prudence, judgment, patience, and hard work; but we already know Kerry has that. Now we know as well that he is prepared to take risks, to err on the side of trying. If Obama can bring himself to trust him, Kerry just might accomplish big things.

[beachmom]

1. There is also a leak problem at State. Who are these people?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/30/the_angst_in_foggy_bottom_state_white_house_syria

I don't like these anonymous criticisms of the Administration. I am just wondering where their loyalties are. This is the only part about Kerry (they're talking about the chemical weapons possibly used in Syria):

But officials told me that as late as Thursday morning, the White House had yet to assemble talking points for the State Department on the subject, a rarity for a White House famously adept at managing 23rd St.'s messaging from Pennsylvania Ave. Just minutes before Secretary of State John Kerry went to brief members of Congress in a closed-door session on Syria, his team was still scrambling to prepare talking points based on the White House letter.

"I think that they just weren't prepared for that assessment by the intel community -- it caught them off guard," one State Department official said, referring to the White House. (Another State Department official denied that the administration was unprepared. "The Hill briefing was long planned and given the decision to release an unclassified letter on Wednesday night, that was naturally a part of what the secretary discussed," this person said. "The language for the briefing and our public language was closely coordinated at every step with the White House. The White House hosted a briefing call with the press." But the invitation to that call went out only minutes before the briefing.)

I am a non-interventionist and oppose getting involved. People act like they know what's going on, but really we don't. And there clearly are Jihadists involved in the conflict. Pretty bad if we end up arming them by accident. Yet McCain, et al act like it's helping Jihadists by NOT arming the "moderates". But, really -- how do we know the difference. The whole discussion is madness, and the American people don't want any part of it.

I wish Sec. Kerry could get his people in line to shut up, and not whisper backstabbing kind of remarks like in this article. But again, WHO are these people? I would like to know.

[karynnj]

2. I think the vast majority of the people in the State Department are career professionals

Many likely have strong points of view developed over the year. I doubt these are Kerry people who are leaking. That was not the case in his campaign, on the SFRC, or in the Senate.

Here, they seem to fault the WH, not Kerry, for not giving State talking points. This sounds like Kerry and his inner team scrambled to create talking points for the State Department spokespeople to use - something that had to be useful as Congressmen came out of the meeting and reporters sought statements from the State Department. Kerry was involved on this issue at the NATO meetings on Tuesday and (I think) Wednesday - so it may be that the WH knew that he and Hagel were already on message. As Hagel, Kerry and Obama all spoke with the same cautionary tone and in fact used phrases directly from that letter - this was clearly well coordinated between the three.

The reactions of Democrats and Republicans to Kerry's closed door briefings seemed positive as to the quality of the briefing they got from Kerry. It seems Kerry gave them an intensive, serious briefing. The reaction I heard was that Kerry spoke to them outlining options and the description I heard from a Republican was "powerful".

Looking just at that part, I think those officials missed the forest for the trees. Kerry had just returned from Brussels, where this issue was addressed, had obviously been in contact with the WH and was well prepared for the briefing -- and he scrambled to ensure the Department had talking points. Maybe Obama trusted him?

[beachmom]

3. Kerry heads the entire State Dept. I don't mean his personal people. I'm saying

everyone who works for him is under his leadership. Maybe it's asking too much that he prevent all leaking, but I still don't like this behavior. This was not like a whistleblower type thing. It was no doubt prominent people at State using their journalist contacts to knock the President. I just don't like it.

[karynnj]

5. Agreed

He does head the department and he should work to determine the atmosphere and the tone. Rereading the article and your post, I see what you mean. I was looking at it as to whether they were undermining Kerry --- and missed that they were undermining Obama, which is worse.

I do think it strange that they thought that the WH itself should have written the State Department talking points. It is possible that this is a change from Hillary to Kerry - that suggests he is more trusted and maybe more involved in policy.. Kerry was very trusted in both campaigns as a surrogate and he - unlike many other surrogates for Obama and others - remembered his role as a surrogate when he was a surrogate - which, to some degree he is when speaking publicly now.

The consistency - as things changed rapidly - of the Obama/Kerry/Hagel comments was impressive and suggested that they were working closely together. Only when you take comments from different times are there any detectable differences. As Kerry's own comments were in sync with Obama's, there likely was trust that he and his team would write the talking points for the State Department.

I do agree that Kerry or David Wade probably should signal that this behavior is not acceptable. The down side of this is that these are senior enough people with their own media contacts - and likely the ones complaining about Kerry not having filled all the positions.

[ucrdem]

4. Very encouraging. Thanks Mass.

As for the one-man angle, I recall from other posts that FP has a tendency to favor intervention over less dramatic policies, so I think there might be more cooperation than the article lets on. In fact it seems aimed at creating a division where there isn't one, i.e. whispering like Iago into Obama's ear that Kerry is stealing his thunder. Right now it looks like I need to log on FP to read the full article, so I'm just going on past impressions, but as I recall they were keen on Libyan intervention, and here they're playing up the "red line" story, so they might have a dog in this race so to speak.

[karynnj]

6. Interesting observations

I read it by logging in via facebook.

I do think they are more for intervention than Obama/Kerry/Hagel are. I think that the idea that Kerry is "stealing Obama's thunder" is not a charge that really could have much weight. Had HILLARY been the one to negotiate the Turkey/Israel relationship, then you might have had that situation as her people pushed stories about her triumph there.

That did NOT happen with Kerry - and it is only people (like us) who observed that Kerry had made trips to Turkey before it happened and that he had long seen Turkey as important for any improvement - who thought Kerry had a hand here and we had NOTHING to point to that said he had a role in this. In fact, it is still an assumption he did and it is a certainty that it made Obama look good. Kerry praised Turkey, Israel and Obama for it and emphasized its importance.

[ucrdem]

7. Thanks and likewise!

I don't think it will work either. I hope it doesn't. But I don't doubt that there are some who would like to create friction between Kerry and Obama so as to isolate and more easily maneuver Obama into committing US forces. He's managed to put together a strong foreign policy team and it stands to reason that the out-of-favor bellicose faction would be looking for ways to weaken it.